


green fields and no horizon

by kafkas



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Catholic Guilt, Character Study, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Loneliness, Non-Chronological, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-14 11:44:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11782449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafkas/pseuds/kafkas
Summary: 'A man can’t live on one thing and one thing alone…’ she twizzles the ice around her glass, ‘If you did that, you’d kill yourself – and then what good would you be to the world?





	green fields and no horizon

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Зеленые поля до горизонта](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14391063) by [Airelinna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Airelinna/pseuds/Airelinna), [ilmare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilmare/pseuds/ilmare)



 

During their five-year partnership, Amon has visited Mado Kureo’s apartment a sum total of three times. This is not unusual. Many investigators prefer to keep company outside of the CCG, offering vague utterances about not wanting to bring their work home with them. The first time, Mado is hospitalized; a fight with an S-rated ghoul, anomalous and humiliating – the investigator made vicious and abject in his mortification.

The apartment is spacious and curiously intimate, a child’s drawings pinned to the refrigerator that Amon at the time feels neither confident nor acquainted enough to mention. Cold bedroom, Spartan bedspread. CDs lining the shelves – Puccini, Leoncavallo, and, incongruously, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Not all belonging to him, Amon decides, although he cannot for the life of him detect a second occupant in that lonely home.

He fills a duffel bag with a fresh set of clothes and some toiletries from the en suite bathroom. From that day onward, Mado walks with a hunch.

 

 

 

Akira frightens him in a way her father hadn’t. In her gaze is none of his needling fondness, and her sense of humor is so brittle he can never quite tell if she is being serious or simply taunting him.

Their first week working together feels to Amon like balancing on knife-tips. She is, he thinks, unabashedly disgusted by him. More so perhaps than by Takizawa, because at least Takizawa has the hindrance of his youth and inexperience to forgive him of his shortcomings.

Amon has no excuse, and he feels the burden of it with every passing hour. He waits for the words – _you killed my father_ – though he knows, feasibly, that they will never come. What Akira lacks in tact she makes up for in reticence.

He catches her gaze lingering on his houndstooth necktie, hopes to see it lighten in recognition. A favor. A neckerchief tied to the arm of a knight at a hastlitude. But her eyes, flashing like molten silver, merely harden into something headier than loathing.

It’s crushing, to be the focus of such a look. Almost like falling in love.

 

 

 

The second time, Donato Popora is scheduled for a review of amenities, and bile is burning at the back of Amon’s throat. Being Cochlea, there’s nothing much to be done in the way of privileges, but the thought of that ghoul receiving anything more than the bare minimum provided to him by tax payers’ dollars fills Amon with disgust. Donato is not a model prisoner. Donato is merely afraid of dying, and if he hadn’t been chief consultant on several cases before Amon was brought on board, he’d have been slated for execution by now.

His stomach roils; not as if he needs to be sick, rather that he needs to scream. He does not love Donato, yet he cannot reconcile himself with the brief swoop of relief he felt at hearing the prison warden’s words.

(Amon does not want to do penance alone.)

Shame must be rolling off of him in waves, because when Mado greets him that morning he does a double take, lone bulging eye – bulging more and more nowadays – narrowing in suspicion. ‘Amenities?’

Amon nods, vaguely, and Mado makes a quiet sound of consternation, clucking his tongue.

‘Sure is a backwards world we live in.’ This is, of course, his way of apologizing. He smiles at Amon, stilted and a little leery, as are the smiles of most men unused to providing comfort.

‘What say we drink to his demise?’

Amon hesitates a moment. He thinks of Donato, paper white gaze, thin-lipped smirk. He nods.

 

***

 

It takes very little to get Mado Kureo drunk, a fact he keeps well hidden from the rest of his cohorts. Even more so his tendency towards self-deprecation.

‘They found Kasuka scattered about the 24th Ward, entrails strung up like Christmas buntings.’ Amon nearly chokes on his drink. ‘Better the Owl didn’t eat her whole,’ his partner continues, smiling sourly, ‘The body goes missing and loved ones can still retain some semblance hope. Me? I know exactly the degree to which I failed her.’

Amon isn’t sure how to respond. _Agree and you blame him. Object and you undermine his grief._

Instead, he settles for a hand on the arm. Stilted, leery smile. ‘I’m sure she’d be proud of the man you are today.’

Mado scoffs, mouth sinking into his glass. ‘Careful,’ he slurs, ‘or your nose might start growing.’ Over his stooped shoulder, Amon can just make out the drawings tacked to the fridge. Claude Monet sun, green fields and no horizon. Mummy and Daddy, together forever.

 

 

 

‘Forgive me father, for I have sinned. My last confession was –’ He fumbles, sees red. Offal spread out across a marble altar. The smell of blood like copper in the air. He clears his throat. ‘… A long time ago.’

‘And what is it that you feel that you have done, my son?’ the priest says through the iron netting. Smilingly, Amon hears. _He’s probably expecting some run of the mill venialities._

He steels himself. ‘I feel that I have killed a good man, father.’

‘ _Killed_ him?’

‘Acted in a way that inadvertently led to his demise,’ Amon quickly corrects himself.

‘Aah.’ A brief puff of air, a shifting of the cassock. ‘This man was a friend of yours?’

‘A colleague.’

‘But you respect him greatly.’

‘He taught me everything I know.’

‘I see.’ Behind the grate, Amon can just make out a ruddy countenance, kind and weather-beaten. Nothing like Donato. ‘Do you mind my asking the manner in which he died?’

‘Violently, and with much left to do on this earth.’

‘I see. You feel that you have robbed him of his destiny.' 

‘Not only that – he…’ Amon wrings his hands, ‘He left behind a child. A daughter – whom I am well acquainted with.’

‘She blames you.’

‘I blame myself.’

‘It hurts more when it’s coming from someone else. A sort of confirmation.’

Amon feels his shoulders slump. ‘She must hate me.’

‘She is hurting terribly, and so are you.’ Again, that smiling tone of voice. ‘You’re not a practicing catholic, are you my son?’

‘No. Not since I was a child, and even then…’

‘You felt His absence.’

Amon nods and then, realizing the priest probably can’t see him, answers in the affirmative. The other man hums lowly as if he had been expecting such an answer.

‘Well, I’d tell you to say twenty Hail Marys and recite the Prayer of Contrition, but I have a feeling neither of those acts are going to help you in the long run.’ He rubs his hands together with a sound like creaking wood. ‘Have you considered, perhaps, seeking absolution outside of the confines of the church?’

‘I’ve nowhere else to go,’ Amon says, and for the umpteenth time in this many months he feels the staggering weight of his loneliness pushing down on him like so much cold water. That urge to scream, rising up inside of him.

The priest is silent for a long time. ‘Maybe,’ he says, eventually, ‘This is where your problem lies.’

 

 

 

At first, he mistakes the body for a hunk of detritus floating in the water, shapeless and near submerged. Then he sees the blood, slick like oil coating the surface, and the limbs, severed, floating several meters away.

 _Mr. Mado,_ he thinks, numbly, stupidly, and that is all he is capable of thinking for a long time. _Mr. Mado. Mr. Mado. Mr. Mado._

(If you repeat a name enough times, does a thing retain its identity, or is it just a thing, limp and heavy in your arms, hair plastered to its forehead and pinkish saliva trickling from its mouth?)

(Amon hopes it’s the former.)

 

 

 

They grow nominally closer after the incident at the restaurant. Days hunched over each other’s desks at the CCG eventually devolve into evenings spent pouring through predation data over prawn tempura and Cutty Sark, until one night Akira is unrolling a futon for him and Amon, bone-tired and perhaps a little tipsy, barely thinks anything of it.

Somewhere in the back of his mind is a voice decrying his actions. There are articles – articles and their subsets – that warn against this. Yet there comes a certain kind of satisfaction in earning Akira’s favor, like being held in the graces of a large and irascible jungle cat. Gratifying. Terrifying.

 

***

 

Some time around midnight he awakens, disorientated and dehydrated, to something nudging at his feet in the blue darkness. Amon startles, reaching for a discarded beer bottle, only to find Maris Stella pricking at the comforter, eyeing Amon dubiously. _Our Lady, Star of the Sea_ , Mado had often referred to her, humming refrains from Byrd, Liszt, and Monteverdi.

(‘You look surprised,’ Akira’s gaze is steely.

‘I just didn’t think he had an interest in classical music. In anything, really, besides killing ghouls.’

‘A man can’t live on one thing and one thing alone…’ she twizzles the ice around her glass, ‘If you did that, you’d kill yourself – and then what good would you be to the world?’)

Amon suppresses a sigh and reaches for the cat. For a moment, her body goes rigid, and he is reminded inexplicably of his present partner, stubborn and unmoving. Then she relaxes, settling into a warm weight against Amon’s chest. He crinkles his nose as the faint smell of softwood and tuna, and scratches Maris Stella behind the ears. In the room over, he hears Akira murmur something in her sleep and roll onto her side, sheets hissing silkily in the near silence. Outside, a police siren wails – domestic branch, probably chasing a drunk driver. A sound somehow comforting in a disorientating world of mangled bodies and eldritch monsters.

Buried beneath his sternum, something spasms painfully and then relaxes, pulsing softly. Amon drifts back to sleep, and dreams of the soft white chests of doves, so easily pierced.

Green fields and no horizon.

 

 

 

His apartment is mostly devoid of furniture by the time Amon summons the will to visit, the bare floor scuffed here and there where the moving crew had struggled to fit something cumbersome through a doorway. Amon peers through the gloom, only to realize too late that somebody has taken the pictures off of the fridge and filed them away somewhere for later collection. He feels a pang of resentment. It had been the only thing he could think to salvage. The only object of clear sentimental value in the entire home.

There is a thick manila envelope sitting on the coffee table, fluorescent yellow post-it-note stuck to the paper. Amon approaches impassively, plucks up the memo.

_Thought you might like to have this – Houji._

Amon grimaces. Of all the unlucky people to be given such a glum job, why Houji? He slits open the envelope almost on autopilot, and it is only when his hands are brushing over the object within that his mind fully returns to his body.

(It is, of course, customary that every new partnership be documented. The CCG may have abandoned many of its higher faculties – such as discerning screening of prospective employees – during its desperate scurry to secure the city, but ceremony wasn’t one of them.)

It cannot be said that Amon has ever been happy to be photographed. Introverted as an adolescent, he had suffered through many an alumni ceremony, smile rictus in its forcedness. But here, hair slightly disheveled, color high in his cheeks after narrowly skirting being devoured by the Applehead, he is perhaps distracted enough to at the very least appear a willing participant.

(Mado’s gaze avoids the camera, instead choosing to fix somewhere slightly above the machine’s line of sight. Smiling distantly. Looking, Amon supposes, to a bloody, vengeful future.)

He sobs for a hot minute, silent and constrained, before slipping the photo frame back into its packaging. In his short life, this is the last time that he will ever allow himself to cry.

 

 

 

He’s never had a girlfriend. It occurs to Amon suddenly and without provocation one morning as he is crossing the foyer, and it’s such a bizarre realization that his pace slows a little, and his eyes blink forcefully – as if his body were working to contradict him.

He’s certainly slept with women, in the academy, and before – months spent roaming the streets, frightened and dissolute, seeking friendly faces wherever he could find them. But he doesn’t remember them.

Neither does he remember his parents’ faces, nor those of the boys from the church. If he wasn’t forced to consult Donato every once in a blue moon, he imagines he’d forget what he looks like too.

Amon wonders if a person can ever truly be said to exist, if no one remembers them. Certainly there will be nobody to hold his face in kind regard, once he is dead and gone.

(More and more, Amon’s mind’s eye is occupied by one face and one face only – pale and mordant, eyebrow raised, mouth posed as if to offer some witty retort, somehow both Akira and her father as one, and perhaps they are not so dissimilar after all –)

Amon knows about love. He sees it in Takizawa’s growing frustrations – ‘Schoolboys, pigtails,’ Houji had muttered, watching the agent launch into another tirade against Akira – and in the cool way that Akira always lets him down, never, he thinks, with quite enough of the venom that Takizawa’s insults warrant. He sees it in the way Suzuya’s pockets are always rustling with one too many sweets, his admiring stares simultaneously ecstatic and tragic. (Suzuya would have liked to have had a father like Officer Shinohara.)

(Big Madam was not like Officer Shinohara.)

He sees it in Kuroiwa, father to his men. He even sees it in loudmouthed Marude, whose shoulders seem to sag a little more with every unit lost.

He wonders if that is enough, then, to love or be loved by somebody. That perhaps it is enough to have only known Mado for a short time, and to have shouldered a portion of his suffering. That he is now doing the same for Akira.

It’s an odd concept, tender and sad. If you kill all the lovers, where does that leave you?

For the first time since growing out of a childhood he does not wish to remember, Koutarou Amon begins to pray.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [♫](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXdNnw99-Ic)


End file.
